Commercial feedyards provide facilities for the feeding of large numbers of confinement-fed animals, such as cattle. A significant number of feedyards are operated throughout the United States, and elsewhere. For instance, in the United States, about 1,500 feedyards presently operate. Many of such feedyards feed and process in excess of 5,000 animals per year. And, many of such feedyards are independently owned and operated. That is to say, individual ones of the feedyards many times form stand-alone, and independent, business entities.
Each of the feedyards typically utilizes one or more information systems to facilitate data collection at the feedyards.
Various information systems have been developed for feedyard operations. For instance, accounting, hospital, and feed-management systems have been developed and customized for feedyard operations. Such systems are intended to provide a feedyard manager or consultant with data to facilitate operation of the feedyard and to permit more-informed judgments to be made in feedyard operation decision making.
Different ones of the information systems have been developed by different entities, many times not permitting integration with one another. Some of the benefits provided by the use of computer-based information systems have been offset by the lack of integration between the different information systems of a single feedyard. The amounts of data which must be reviewed by a feedyard manager or consultant to facilitate the making of decisions to optimize the yard production, such as animal health and weight-gain is sometimes so significant, and provided to the manager or consultant in an inconvenient form, so as to significantly reduce the benefits of such systems.
Also, because the feedyards are many times independently-owned and operated, the feedyard manager or consultant has access only to data of the particular feedyard at which the manager or consultant is employed. Access to data related to feedyards located in a particular region would be helpful in the determination, for instance, of whether or not weather conditions are the cause of a feedyard condition. That is to say, a weather condition common to an entire region of feedyards might be likely to cause the same feedyard trends in individual ones of the feedyards of the entire region. A feedyard-specific trend, or a professional's practice-specific trend, in contrast, would be likely to be exhibited in only the particular feedyard.
Because of the independent ownership and operation of different feedyards, the separately-owned feedyards are oftentimes effectively in competition with one another. Data pertaining to the operation of a particular feedyard, if provided to another feedyard, together with the identity of the originating feedyard, might give others of the feedyards a competitive advantage over the originating feedyard.
While systems by which to pool data and exchange data between feedyards have been developed, such existing systems do not provide appropriate safeguards to prevent the identification of the particular feedyard from which data is obtained.
A manner by which to pool data from more than one feedyard while providing such data in a system free of identifiers which identify the particular feedyard from which data elements of the pooled data are derived would therefore be advantageous. Also, a feedyard consultant might provide consulting services for more than one feedyard. Because each feedyard might have several information systems, and the various feedyards might have different types of information systems, the consultant shall need to know how to access a potentially large number of information systems.
A system by which better to facilitate display of data provided by operation of information systems of a feedyard would therefore also be advantageous.
It is in light of this background information related to feedyards that the significant improvements of the present invention have evolved.